Making the Most of Banana January 2009
Nematodes - banana's leading pest
Professor Altus Viljoen: Scientist, University of Stellenbosch in South Africa
Summary:
Nematodes are probably the most severe pest of banana, affecting both dessert and cooking varieties. Typically they infest the root of the plant, interfering with the uptake of nutrients and water. To tackle nematodes, farmers need to get clean, nematode-free plants in the first place. This is possible at farm level by careful selection and simple treatment of the planting material. Plants produced by tissue culture should also be nematode-free.
Suggested introduction:
Nematodes are one of the most diverse types of animals on the planet. Over 80,000 species of these tiny worms have been described. Many are parasites, causing health problems in plants, animals and people. In agriculture, some nematodes are helpful, killing unwanted pests. But others are themselves pests, inflicting damage on crops and reducing farmers' yields.
Banana plants are frequently attacked by nematodes. Research has shown that in East African Highland Bananas, nematodes can reduce yields by 50 per cent or more. So what can farmers do to protect their crop? The answer, as Sydney Phiri found out, when he spoke to Professor Altus Viljoen from the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, is to start with clean, nematode-free planting material.
Tape in:
Nematodes of bananas are probably the...
Tape out:
...that are already inside of the plant.
Closing Announcement:
Altus Viljoen of the department of plant pathology at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. He was talking to Sydney Phiri.
Making the most of it:
Your listeners may like to hear from a local extension officer about ideas for nematode control in your area.
Further information:
Prof Altus Viljoen,
Email: altus@sun.ac.za
Transcript
Viljoen
Nematodes of bananas are probably the most severe of pest that you can get and it's affecting all kinds of bananas, that's both the cooking bananas as well as the dessert or the sweet type that we find at the stores. What they most often do is that they go inside of the root and then cause some lesions and interfere with the uptake of nutrients and water into the plant.
Phiri
You know when we talk about the nematodes of the banana, how are they spread?
Viljoen
Basically the primary means is by infected material. So people that know banana know that they form suckers and that's a vegetative reproduction of the banana plant itself. And in systems where people cannot afford clean planting material coming from tissue culture laboratories, these nematodes will be infecting those suckers and they will spread with the suckers into new regions.
Phiri
How can they be prevented?
Viljoen
Right the best way of preventing it is certainly the use of clean tissue culture planting material because there is no way that they will be infected unless they get infected in nurseries. Basically what they do is they will take the growing point and they will reproduce that on artificial medium - that means under sterile conditions. And they will split a single plant into something like 1,000 plants which they then can go and plant out. And that material is usually free of pathogens and pests. If however you have to use planting material that is coming from the field, the best way of doing it is what they call paring. That means they actually slice open the rhizome of the banana until they see no further lesions. A second way of doing that is to actually treat it with hot water for a few seconds and in that way they will kill the eggs or the nematodes that are already inside of the plant. End of track.
